2012 Digital PR Awards: Most Engaged/Online Community

CRT/tanaka and DOCa Rioja, Spain's most prominent wine region, launched a social media program in 2011 targeting U.S. trade, consumers, media and industry influencers and wine consumers. Messaging was designed to frame Rioja as a producer of superior wines, offering tremendous value, style diversity and food-friendliness. In order to increase brand awareness and engagement, the team provided approachable and fun wine education sessions. These included hosting and sponsoring stand-alone social media events. The agency provided samples and engaged bloggers during a "Meet the Sponsors" event at the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference, hosted three panel discussions and tasting events and developed a Rioja Wine Crawl (5-restaurant Rioja wine crawl for 300+ wine bloggers with by-the-glass specials; sweepstakes to win trip to Rioja among participants). The Rioja Grand Tasting Livestream event in NYC expanded the reach of annual Grand Tasting event by live streaming the VIP winemaker seminar. The event also featured 14 wine expert interviews, and walk-around tasting in New York, including advance promotion to top 150 US wine blogger and tweeters via event hashtag #riojabuzz

The initiative helped engage 300+ wine bloggers, resulting in 7 articles and blogger tweet chat with 83 wine drinkers. The campaign increased the brand’s Facebook following by 1,200%; engagement rate increased by 400% compared to 2010; Twitter following by 222% year over year–but most importantly, increased shipments of Rioja wines 12% in 2011 over the previous year.

In this 5th volume of PR News’ Book of Employee Communications, our authors cover more than 45 articles on crisis communications, social media policies, human resources collaboration, brand evangelism and more.